Ecology of the Phrenic Scourge

Of all the substitutes for the mind flayers in third-party products, my favorite has to be the Phrenic Scourge.

Nomenclature: aquane, brilkoun, durlans, mind eater, nyarl, ochthichthuruch, paretiophage, psycholus, starspawn of Cthulhu, thought ripper, the worm that walks,

Description: writhing masses of seafood with prodigious psychic powers and dark designs on the hero's love interest

Phrenic Scourge ©2005 Beth Trott

Phrenic scourges originated in the sourcebook The Iconic Bestiary: Classics of Fantasy from Lion's Den Press (now owned by Purple Duck Games) and were later expanded on in several sourcebooks by Dreamscarred Press including High Psionics: Phrenic Scourges and Psionic Bestiary: Phrenic Hegemony. This makes them the single most detailed and frequently appearing of all the mind flayer substitutes I know to have been published.

Phrenic scourges are responsible for a number of things. They created the intellect devourers and puppeteers as spies and various forms of living equipment and chaositech.

Unlike the extremely derivative mindolons from Edition Pi by Daemoneye Publishing, phrenic scourges differ noticeably from mind flayers. They do not eat brains and they do not transform hosts into new scourges. Most obviously, they are actually masses of tentacles connected to a central trunk rather than alien humanoids with octopus heads. They lack eyes, ears or faces, but their tentacles serve the same purpose as conventional sensory organs (so they are not immune to gaze attacks, thank goodness).

The brain- and thought-eating has been moved over to the intellect devourers and caulborn in the case of Paizo's Pathfinder, or encephalon gorgers if you play adventures by Frog God Games. In my setting, the intellect devourers not only eat brains but implant their larvae inside the brains of humanoids to enslave them and potentially reproduce (a la the brilkoun in Monster Geographica: Underground).

Phrenic scourge larva only need a source of food in order to mature, but brains are helpful because the larva can acquire information about the local area by eating a fresh brain. The brain may be beast or humanoid as available, and High Psionics goes into a fair amount of detail the effect this has on their culture.

Unlike the mind flayers, phrenic scourges have numerous variants created by selective breeding and picking of particular host species. Scourge larvae often pick up the traits of host organisms, such as animal hosts leading to scourges that prefer a quadrupedal gait. The most extreme cases are freakish hybrids of scourge and host organism, which only continue to exist by virtue of breeding true regardless of successive hosts. These are detailed in the Psionics Bestiary.